


Love is in the Name

by orphan_account



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Dysphoria, M/M, No Homophobia, No Smut, No Transphobia, Self-Discovery, Trans Girl Yuri Plisetsky
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-12
Updated: 2018-12-11
Packaged: 2019-09-16 17:40:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16958553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Set a couple years after canon, Yuri Plisetsky slowly learns how to navigate the elite figure skating scene while also trying to navigate her own identity. With the help of her friends and her family, she learns to find love everywhere, but especially in herself.





	1. Prologue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a quick note: for a couple of chapters I use mainly he/him pronouns for Yuri as that is how he refers to himself when he is living as Yuri. After those couple of chapters that’ll change, as she starts to refer to herself with she/her pronouns, and stops acting as Yuri and starts acting like [name redacted.]

Yuri creeps through his apartment with practiced ease, skimming his fingertips against the chill surfaces of tables and counters to guide his way. It’s dark. It’s dark, but Yuri dares not turn on the lights, for fear of waking up Yuuri, a notoriously light sleeper. So Yuri has to trail his hand along the walls and the furniture, opening his eyes desperately wide to try and catch every small prick of light. 

 

This has become a nightly ritual of his since Mila had started staying with them- waking around midnight and slowly making his way to the guest room, hopefully not waking Yuuri up in the process. He’s lucky he has light kitten feet.

 

The doorknob is freezing cold to the touch, and the creak of the old door makes Yuri cringe. Once the crack in between the doorjamb and the peeling green paint on the door is just wide enough, he slips in. 

 

Mila never closes her curtains when she sleeps, so the moonlight filters through the dirty window and touches the surfaces of the room lightly. Yuri navigates over Mila’s cardboard box that holds her collection of knickknacks from all over the world, through the maze of books and deconstructed electronics and crusted-over air-dry clay, past her full-body, ornate mirror, and straight to her closet.

 

Yuri knows exactly what he’s going to- he’s done this so many times before, he could do it blindfolded. Hell, he practically does, with how dark it is sometimes. 

 

The rustle that the clothes make, and the slight clack of the hangers when they are taken from the rod, sounds deafeningly loud in the silence of the house, but Mila could sleep through World War Three and be none the wiser. Yuri has managed, over time, not to mind how loud the noises sound to him in the night. 

 

With his mission a success, Yuri takes the same practiced route back to his own room. His room is secluded far away from the other three, luckily, so he can get back to making a racket. He always leaves the light in his room off, though- he always loves the dramatization of this moment, even if it’s the same moment over and over, night after night.

 

He slides the clothes off the hanger, then slides his pyjamas off himself, and shimmies into Mila’s old and unloved outfit. He heads over to his own mirror, admiring his barely-there silhouette. Satisfied that it’s all on right, he reaches over to his lamp switch.

 

When the light comes on, every night at midnight, he leaves, and she takes his place. Yuri admires herself in the mirror- finally looking at least a little bit right. He doesn’t quite have a name for her yet, but knows that she’s more Yuri than Yuri ever was. 

 

Nighttime is when she truly gets to be herself, gets to stop acting, gets to stop playing the role she was forced into. Every night, for an hour, she can be whoever she wants, instead of Yuri Plisetsky, a man. And she is someone different, every night. One night she calls herself Liliya, another, Mila, another, Ksenia. She thinks maybe if she wasn’t so damn fond of her name she’d have found one by now.

 

She sighs. 

 

“If only Yuri was a girl’s name,” she whispers to herself, smoothing down the skirt around her mid-thigh, running her fingers over the lacy hem.

 

Soon enough, the hour is over, and she’s sliding the clothes back into Mila’s closet. Though she gets to be herself every night, she always has to wake up again as Yuri Plisetsky. She hates waking up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m super excited about this fic. I’ve always adored the headcanon of Yuri being a trans girl- I think that he’s the most interesting character to apply nearly everything to, just given his complete and total lack of maturity in canon. He’s the one with the most space to grow and develop and it just fascinates me to no end that everyone chooses to develop him as a person differently. 
> 
> You’ll soon see, but in this fic I chose to mature him very... maturely. I also gave him some more hobbies, because I feel like that’s something everyone needs. Most of his and his friend’s hobbies and interests, if not all, are hobbies and interests of mine, and I found it easiest to apply my own hobbies/interests to the characters as I can portray that more accurately and easily.
> 
> As for some of the relationships- I really have always thought it would be super cool to pair up Minami and Yuri (friendship-wise) given their polar opposite personalities as displayed in canon. I have Minami being a bit more mellowed down when he’s not around his idol, although I couldn’t bring myself to (and thought it was being ingenuine to his character) stop him from being generally energetic and bubbly. I digress, I thought it would be an interesting dynamic to explore, both in the beginnings of their friendship (of which there will be flashbacks, because hey. Gotta love backstory that’s given in the easiest and most blatant way possible! Very classy of me, thank you) and in the fic’s timeframe.
> 
> Additionally, I chose not to have Otabek and Yuri be romantically interested in each other, because... I’m just not into that ship. Also, the focus of this fic is Yuri, and his journey, and his self-expression, and the way his relationships change and grow and how he interacts with others, so even if there was some Otabek/Yuri romance going on, it would be presented in a way that probably... isn’t how shippers want to see. It’d probably be boring. 
> 
> This note is long as hell, and by far the most formal note I’ve ever written, but what can one do? Naught. I would appreciate any feedback! The next chapter is in the works, so I’ll for sure have that one and a third one up, but I’m... unreliable. I may get up to 3 chapters then decide that I’m bored of this work and abandon it.


	2. It’s Cold But Liliya is Colder

Yuri Plisetsky wakes up for the last time on a pleasant Tuesday, right after the crack of dawn, in October. 

 

The birds were chirping, some bastard was yelling outside, the air conditioning had failed them, again, and he did not want to get out from under his duvet. But he had to, even if the apartment was colder than the ice rink he spent his life at. 

 

Looking in the mirror felt less painful that morning, which when it happened, was always a pleasant surprise. The sharp angles in his body were starting to be softened by the change that came with age. His body was filling out more, although some of that could be attributed to the way years of figure skating tones your hips and legs. He was thankful for the way it rounded out his hips and slimmed his waist, how he was losing his boyish lank. But he wasn’t thankful for the wisps of facial hair puberty brought along, or the drops in his voice, or the broadening of his shoulders. It seemed to him that he was predestined to be a girl, though, as even with the small nudges puberty was giving him towards manhood, he still remained feminine. 

 

Regardless, the boy in the mirror looked nothing like him. He wasn’t exactly sure how he was supposed to look, but it wasn’t like this. This was just a role he was playing- for a long, long 17 years. And it was a role he was going to play fiercely today.

 

He left the mirror’s entrapments, digging through his closet to find something decent. He found pants just fine, but none of his shirts would work- they were all either unfit for training, or smelled like teenage boy sweat, Cheeto dust, and poorly-made, somehow overly-alcoholic kvass. (Mila couldn’t make kvass for shit, and Yuri was never going to trust her again.)

 

“MILA!” Yuri more or less screamed.

 

Her voice sounds muffled through the wall, “what the fuck do you want!?” 

 

“I need one of your shirts for practice!” 

 

“Stop yelling before I kill you both!” Yuuri’s exasperated tone joined the brief shouting match.

 

Yuri groaned, stomping through the apartment to the guest room. 

 

“Hey slob, I need a shirt,” he said.

She didn’t look up from whatever game she was playing on her phone.

 

“Why don’t you get one from Yuuri or Viktor?” 

 

Frustrated, he snatched a shirt from her practice shirt drawer, “we all know that their shirts are way too big for me, it makes practice hard when you’re drowning in fabric.”

 

“Oh yeah-” Mila snorted- “I forgot you have the body of a twelve-year-old girl.”

 

Yuri laughed dryly, ignoring the small part of him that was happy with the comparison, and brandished the shirt, “well, me and my twelve-year-old girl body are gonna go eat breakfast, feel free to join us whenever- but remember, today Liliya has us, and she’ll beat your ass if you’re less than ten minutes early.”

 

Panic sent tremors up Mila’s body, and she sprung into action, tossing her phone across the room. Yuri laughed as he left the room.

 

“Mm, smells good, what is it?” Yuri asked Yuuri, pulling Mila’s shirt on over his head. It wasn’t quite cropped, but it fell just short, exposing a thin strip of skin at his hip. 

 

“I had this for breakfast in America a lot, it’s like a breakfast burrito, kind of, but less heavy, because I don’t want you and Mila to throw up when Liliya puts you through the damn wringer. Tomorrow I’m gonna make a big, traditional American breakfast since I’m heading back to Japan tomorrow. A nice little goodbye breakfast, as it were.”

 

Yuri salivated. What a winning proposition. 

 

Viktor, still foggy from sleep, stumbled into the kitchen, mumbling a faint thank you when Yuuri handed him a burrito. Mila was making all kinds of frantic noises in her room while Yuri tore into his food. She burst into the room a couple minutes later, when he had just finished his last bite. 

 

She practically threw herself onto the bar chair, scooping the wrap off her plate and shoving it into her mouth at Mach speed. Yuri chuckled. He sent a thumbs up to Yuuri in thanks, heading to his room to pack his gear in his bag and grab some warm outerwear, before he and Mila headed to the subway.

 

“Fix the aircon while we’re gone, please!” Yuri called back through the swiftly closing door.

 

He hears a muffled  _ sure thing!...  _ and they were off. And by  _ off, _ they were sprinting down the stairs of the old Soviet-era apartment building, tripping over themselves in their haste because falling to an untimely death in this dimly-lit, cigarette-rank stairwell would be better for their health than being late to ballet lessons with Liliya Baranovskaya. 

 

(Liliya is strict. Liliya is rigidly, unflinchingly strict. You could have all the reason in the world not to make it on time and she would look you in the eye, and you could see, behind those piercing eyes of hers, that she has no sympathy for you or your excuses.)

 

So they raced. 

 

By the time they made it to the station, they could hardly breathe, looking like gasping fish, trying to fit as much of the cold October air into their lungs as possible. 

 

The train ground to a halt in front of them no less than half a minute later. Mila had started to hack up her lungs and Yuri still sounded like a choking raccoon. People pour out of the automatic doors and they stumble in. 

 

Both of them attracting mildly concerned, but also relatively disinterested stares, they plopped down onto two seats. It took a few more moments before their battle against their respiratory system abated, with the recycled air in the compartment doing the most to hinder them and the least to help.

 

After a few more seconds, Yuri chuckled lowly, “you’d think as professional athletes we’d be maybe a little bit more in shape than this.”

 

Mila let a harsh blow of air out of her nose, “yeah,” she murmured back, “you’d think we’d have a bit more stamina. But we’re not built for running, so…”

 

“You’re absolutely right. You think ‘we’re not built for running’ would be an acceptable excuse to Liliya?”

 

“Yuri, if you said that, she’d kill you on the spot.”

 

“You accuracy is unflinching.”

 

“Thank you, I try.”

 

So goes the rest of the train ride, which was, for all intents and purposes, decently quick. 

 

Nerves running high, they run to the ice rink as well. When they burst in through the doors, the clock above the reception desk told them that they’d  just barely made it to 10 before 9. 

 

Liliya stood in the locker rooms, arms crossed, eyebrow cocked.

  
“You two’re on thin ice. You have two minutes to get ready for dance and get to dance room 2A.  _ Davai. _ ”


End file.
